Gather the Lightning

by Jalyn Renae Fiske

There is stone beneath you, ancient stone, ancient as the Earth itself. It hums of the world’s birth against your craggy limbs, and you awaken. Your obsidian eyes take in the shadow-wrought room. You cannot move, as earth does not move, not in a way that can be seen.

So this is life.

A man stands at the window, his back to you. He calls himself an alchemist.

“Quintessence, proselytized Aristotle, is the aether all around us,” he says. “A substance made of souls and stars.” The alchemist sticks his head out the open window, takes in a deep breath, and exhales a mixture of exhaustion, exhilaration, and annoyance to the night sky. “The Gods breathe it. They feed upon it.”

You conjure the stone’s humming into larger movements and try to sit up, to approach the window and breathe the aether, too, but gravity insists you remain prone on the alchemist’s workspace.

He notices you stirring and returns to your side. “Are you listening?”

You attempt to nod the rain-soaked earth that composes your head. The clay sloshes and drips at first, then begins to harden. You fear you’ll be cemented in place, forced to stillness forever, your hope of motion dashed before you could even begin.

“Imagine a spiderweb, silky and unseen,” the alchemist says. “Now imagine it everywhere—in your laughter, in your lungs, wrapped around your eyes, like veins of quartz and feldspar deep within mountains, buried under ancient seas. You are a soul, a spiderweb, connected to everything. You are everything, dark and beautiful and strong.”

Your volcanic lips form the silent words: I am?

The alchemist ignores you. He is speaking.

“There was once another like you, a shapeshifter, or so she thought. She had me convinced of her transformative power, which I confess I witnessed, so she wasn't lying. Not truly. But a wolf? That is all? She came to me because she was done transforming, and it is well known I study the art of metamorphosis.” The alchemist pauses to scowl at the memory. “She wanted to stop. How does one stop changing? How does one become a rock?”

Inside your chest is a precious chunk of rosy rhodochrosite. It flinches at the word rock. It does not beat. It does not bleed.

“There have been others, too. The selkie, the swan maiden, both longing to revert to a baser form. How small their imagination, to limit themselves to a singular being. Even just the two, a without and a within, betrays a primitive mind. We are not the flip of a coin. Are you? Are you a coin?”

Your copper tongue, your silver teeth, they ache to say something. Anything.

“That's enough for now. You've just been born. I must gather my thoughts before we proceed. And you—are you capable of rest? Of dreams?”

The alchemist leaves you in the dark on the slab of stone, his scarecrow silhouette skittering along the wall from the candelabra’s light he takes with him. If you had skin, you’d reject its icy surface and long to search for a blanket, but stone on stone is a comfort. It reminds you that you are not alone.

#

You dream you are a field mouse lost in the grass. The blades of green are far too high, swaying far too violently in the wind. You dart this way and that, but the grass refuses to end. Your eyes grow wide. Your paws patter upon the soil. A hawk arrives. It captures you with its feet and flies you across the field to a rocky cliff, its nest therein. Its talons rip into you, its beak digs into your gut.

Your insides escape. Your bones break. Your head rolls away.

#

You wake and take in the sunlight and the sound of chirping birds through the open window. You admire the wooden planks on the floor—cherrywood from the forest—and the stone bricks of the wall—limestone from the quarry—even the stained-glass windows—molten sand from the shore—stained with berries, petals, and grass. The building is old, but not as old as its parts.

Where am I? Something is lodged in your throat, sharp and warm. You try to clear it.

The alchemist appears and looms over you. “How do you make sound? The mechanics, please. What happens inside you to summon such rumblings?”

It is thunder. Little shocks of lightning traverse my open spaces, vibrating the air.

That is what you want to say, but all that comes out are cracklings and moans.

The alchemist studies you. In turn, you study him. Greying hair at the temples, shirt collar pristine and sharp. His eyes appear to steal and hoard the light, as a black hole might. Long ago, before your elements found and formed the Earth, you wandered the starscape as radiation and rays and knew of such things. You are steadily knowing them again.

“No matter,” the alchemist says. “Soon you will have electrical signals carried by neurons. Muscles contract, tendons vibrate, and out of thin air come words. Right now, you are raw, held together by incantation alone. I placed a parchment in your throat inscribed with truth. That truth brought you to life. If I stuffed a spell called death in your mouth, you would return to inert rubble. Or would you not? Shall we try?”

#

Rocks do not die. They hum. They vibrate. They observe.

#

The alchemist welcomes you back with a satisfactory grunt. “As I imagined. You are animated by aether alone. How does that feel? Knowing you would be nothing without a pivotal piece of aether?”

You rumble a response in thunder. Words would never suffice.

The alchemist shakes his head. “All you utter are grunts and growls. You are Golem, are you not? The one who can transform into God?”

You shiver at the thought.

“After breakfast, we begin.”

Still prone, you watch the alchemist cut a loaf of bread and slivers of mozzarella and tomato inches from where you lie paralyzed. You listen to the knife grate against the crust and the cutting board, the slippery sound of cheese and juices. They are so close as to be whispers in your ear. His raspy breathing. Shoes scuffing against the hardwood floor. He combines the ingredients in a stack with basil leaves and sprinkles salt on top. A few stray crystals tumble onto you. He eats the sandwich in small, slow bites while reading from a leather-bound book, your chest a bookrest and crumb-catcher. The crisp paper scratches against his fingers when he turns a page and smooths it down.

#

“We’ll start simple, of course,” the alchemist says. A crumb lingers on his fleshy lip.

Simple? You think of the smallest things, things you have never seen but deeply know. The little things that have crawled upon your geological ancestors and basked in the sun, a million memories passed down through erosion and pressure and heat: the Atta ant that can lift 50 times its own weight; the slingshot spider that can sprint 10 miles per hour; the mantis shrimp that can punch its dactyls as fast as a bullet to smash its prey.

How badly you want to lift, sprint, punch.

“You began as insignificant rock, clumps of clay, bits of stone and mineral. Why don’t we attempt something similar? Finer than gravel but coarser than dust. The Romans named their stadiums after the word sand, for all the sand they poured to soak up the blood.”

His hands come for your face, prying open your jaw as if you were a corpse with rigor mortis to place a new piece of parchment in your throat.

One that reads arena.

Transformation tastes of horseradish: spicy, raw, and addictive. It smells of patchouli, musky and warm, and sounds as lonely and relentless as the ocean floor. But it feels like crumbling. All that you are, reduced to splinters and shards.

The Tyrrhenian Sea crashes into the coast along Rome, bestowing simple gifts of mollusks and their nautilus, auger, and murex shells, so small and broken as to go unnoticed. They journeyed from Africa and the Middle East to reach Rome. Into these, and into you, does the gladiator blood seep.

The alchemist runs his hands across your gentle grains and hidden shells and digs until he finds the parchment, scattering bits of you across the stone slab and onto the floor.

“This time, I think…” he says and scratches his inked metal nub on paper.

He buries the two enchantments inside you, like a farmer planting potatoes under a full moon. You recall an echo from your cousin, the soil, that crops grow faster from seedling to stalks when the moon is brightest. You think of the wolf-woman, held sway by the moonlight, forced to change against her will.

And then the scent of patchouli descends.

The parchment reads serpent.

Instead of crumbling, transformation feels as though you’re being stretched apart like taffy. You have no center, no core, no self. A billion hooks pull you in all directions and dimensions, so impossibly thin that you begin to tear. When it’s finally finished, you reach from star to star, but you are so taut that to tug would be to snap and self-destruct.

So you slither.

The alchemist composes a new spell on a new paper. You wonder what makes the magic. Is it enchanted ink? Paper soaked in herbs and dried with smudge and smoke? Or is the word itself all the magic one needs?

The alchemist grasps you just behind the jaw, squeezes. Your fangs gleam; poison collects into drops like tears at the points. You writhe. You want to strike, but he has you firmly in his grasp.

He stuffs the next parchment on top of the others, careful to avoid your fangs.

You melt into yourself, an octopus now, drifting carefree with the current, maneuvering in lucid, undulating motions. You cannot force it. You must become water if you want to move water, ever flowing and constant. But there is no water. Your tentacles search for purchase on the slick, dry stone to slide away and dive into the waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Instead, the alchemist holds you down by your mantle. Your three hearts pound wildly against the weight.

He shoves the next parchment into your beaked mouth, the sides of your maw tearing from the force of so many commands.

Now you are a klipspringer, launching in brazen leaps from rock to rock, striding upon powerful legs and intrepid hooves. Your transformation surges forward without hindrance or burden. With every bound, you know you are you and that you are free. And then the physical realm punctures your experience, and the alchemist has you by the horns. They are small and sharp as knives, but they are no help. You fear your neck will snap with every violent tug. He pulls back, forcing your black nose upward.

The newest spell is rammed down your throat, blocking your airway.

The crumbling, stretching, drifting, bounding continues in rapid succession from lifeform to lifeform, spurred by whatever whim the alchemist enjoys. You live a thousand lives, a thousand deaths—downtrodden by his trespassing hands—until he smiles and scribbles what he truly wants you to become.

This transformation is cold. It feels incomplete. Your mind expands beyond instinct and treads toward intuition, but your existence is pointless and predatory. You do not interact with your surroundings, but rather obsess with your own thoughts. You exist apart, aware of the expanse of the universe and the ineffectual gains of your efforts. To know is to despair, to strive is to fail. To be human is to understand how insignificant you are, just a speck of stardust in a cosmos filled with specks of stardust.

The parchment commands you to loathe life itself, but you cannot despise the very thing that makes souls and stars. You have been stardust since the very start.

The alchemist guffaws at your nakedness. “A female form, why is that?” He leans in and over-enunciates as if you are feeble-minded, his tone tinged with disgust. “The parchment reads man,” he says as he slaps his hand against his chest. “Man.”

The stack of parchments lodged in your throat cuts you with every breath, every turn of the head. Your jaw dislocates and stretches to the utmost edge. Each swallow is a punishment, sour as copper. You struggle to speak, to seize what the alchemist promised earlier: Muscles contract, tendons vibrate, and out of thin air come words. The paper chokes, and you wonder if saliva and blood are enough to smear the ink and end the spell. Tears collect at the corners of your eyes like serpent’s venom.

“This is not up for debate or interpretation, Golem. I command. You obey.”

If you swallow the parchments whole, will they dissolve in your stomach acid, erased, deconstructed and digested? Does the magic remain inside? Like the sand and the serpent and the klipspringer? They have never left. They still live within you, all your previous forms, all your nascent iterations, nestled among your tissue and bone, quivering with life.

Even ones you have yet to become.

The alchemist seethes with fury. “Speak, so I know you understand.”

The collective memory of the cosmos mingles, whispers, screams, through the ages and through the aether. You breathe it in. Your throat is like a mine, full of ash and ready to collapse, but you breathe it in. The smallest amount is all the amount. A single grain, a crop. A solitary drop, an ocean.

Your life began with a simple command: Truth.

Here is what is true.

The wolf-woman had been bitten by a man, a man who wanted to make her like himself.

The swan maiden and selkie: their skins, their wings, were stolen to make them slaves of marriage and birth.

And the golem, the helpless, grows and grows until it can destroy the universe.

Only a god can become such a thing.

“Speak!” the alchemist shrieks.

You rise from your altar, and he steps back.

You lift your hand.

From your mouth, you pull the first parchment, drenched with spit and blood, and let it fall from your fingers. It lands on the floor at your feet with a sloppy, sucking sound. You reach for the next. And the next. A heap of self-soaked paper, the ink blotchy and faded as watercolor, collects like bits of trimmed fat and gristle at the butcher.

Finally, you retrieve the very first and now the very last from your throat, the alchemist’s notion of truth. It is dark and drips crimson like a placenta. You let go, and it sinks into the pile, melding with the rest.

Without it, you do not collapse.

The alchemist is appalled. He reaches for fresh parchment and scripts the word death, as if it can stop you. He holds it up like a garland of garlic or a mirror or a silver bullet and hurls anathemas to curse you into submission.

You step closer. He stands his ground. You step again. You keep stepping until his banal offering brushes against your torn lips. The alchemist’s eyes grow wide as you bite the paltry piece of paper with your teeth, ripping it from his grip.

And you consume his gift of death.

With it, you do not collapse.

The alchemist flees, flinging wide the cherrywood doors. You hear the pattering of his feet recede in the distance, and it is not unlike the beating sound of a hawk’s wings. You could become a hawk. Or a spider, spinning your web deep across the world like veins of quartz and feldspar buried deep in sleeping rocks. And what of the woolly mammoth or the passenger pigeon? The western black rhinoceros could live again if you so choose.

You walk to the open window, breathe the chilled autumn air, and discern the flavor of aether to be that of matcha and marionberry, a touch of winter and wanton skies.

You breathe again.

Your lips part, once and always volcanic.

You gather your lightning to speak.